New Mexican initiative promises sustainable crocodile skins
09/03/2016
Focusing on the Morelet crocodile, which is mostly found in Mexico, the two organisations will set up a pilot project to encourage local communities to look after the reptile’s natural habitat, boost the numbers of Morelet crocodiles living in the wild and establish “a production system” for the skins that makes sure a fair share of the economic benefit goes back to those local communities.
CONABIO said on announcing the agreement that the project will consist of safely removing a proportion of the eggs female Morelet crocodiles lay in the wild for incubation in special centres. It said that the success rate for hatching healthy baby crocodiles would increase from 10% in the wild to 95% under the auspices of the new initiative.
An integral part of the project will be to set up an identification system for each skin so that the companies involved along the supply chain will be able to verify that the material has come from a sustainable source and that the crocodile was not hunted.
According to CONABIO, initiatives it has co-ordinated and financed since 2011 have helped Mexico’s Morelet crocodile population build up to good levels and it pointed out in its announcement that international trade in skins and other products from it is permitted, but regulated under the CITES convention. It said that the global crocodile skins market has a volume of 1.5 million skins per year at the moment, but that Mexico is only exporting around 1,500.
In December 2007-January 2008 World Leather published an article on Cocolé, a start-up Mexican leathergoods brand that used only leather from Morelet crocodiles that had come from an earlier conservation initiative. This article is available in the leatherbiz technical library archive.
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